October 2004 Archives

Maryland (who???) beats FSU. That helps take some of the pain out of this horribly horrible Gator season....

We will begin with introductions.

The First Cat of the house is Lorax, also known as Furball.

She comes when Mr. Man calls, especially if the call includes reference to "treats" (dried anchovies). She does pretty much anything she's not supposed if I'm silly enough to call.

And the beta cat is Melvin, also known as a complete dingbat.

She's pretty much untrainable, but does do wheelies fairly predictably. She's an equal-opportunity feline, though, and loves up on Mr. Man almost as much as she does me. (Nesting is reserved for me only. Silly kitten.)

Digitized WWII posters here and back up to the main page for a similar link to WWI posters.

[Link from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter]

Green lights from Shepherd to the loop on San Felipe this morning. Whoo hoo!!!

TxB sent us this email today:

From: Jack in Houston
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 9:07 AM
To: Curtin, Mark; Darcy Curtin
Subject: Can I order one with wings?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/10/27/biotechnology.cats/index.html

That probably would not be a good idea. They could hang on the ceiling and shit on you.

I think somebody was having a bad morning.

Hi Mom,

I know you're stuck in Florida with the endless campaigning, and you don't have cable, so you're stuck with network news, but you DO have the internet, and that makes all the difference. Here is a list of some of my favorite places to go to learn more about what's REALLY going on these days. If you do a bit of surfing, I think you'll find reasons to be more optimistic about Iraq and Afghanistan, more pessimistic about the likelihood that Mr. Kerry would be a positive force in the oval office, and much more skeptical of the "regular" news sources.

Love,
Darcy

Every Day:

• BlackFive has a definite military focus, with lots of news from the men and women who are actually there doing the work, i.e. posts like this.


• Michelle Malkin calls it like she sees it, even when she doesn't agree with the President.


• INDC Journal is INDspensible for fact-checking (almost any post) and the occasional Moonbat report just to keep things in perspective.


• Ann Althouse writes about lots more than just politics. I found her through a link to this post, where she explains how and why she gave up on Kerry.

Less Frequently but only because I'm lazy:

• Chrenkoff is best known for his Good news from ... posts, which may take a few sittings to get through, but even if you just scan them, you'll realize how much is happening that you're not hearing about through "normal" channels.

Cat blogging?? Blogging cats?? Carnival of the Cats??

What freakin' rock have I been living under?? How did I not know about all this?? For heaven's sake, even the blogfather does it!

Okay then. Gotta get some pix of the furball and the freakette up soon!!

Beatrix Potter on-line :-) Ok, not nearly as good as the real thing, but fun all the same.

[Link via a long convoluted web journey from Carnival of the Cats that ended up here

Althouse is blog-reviewing Dylan's "Chronicles" and offers this excerpt from chapter 5:

Description of Joan Baez: "Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God ..." P. 255.

I'm playing with FotoFusion today and made a FanFest page.

It was actually Fall today! The sun was warm, the air was cool--that perfect time before it gets "crisp". You could see forever, fluffy clouds, blue sky. Perfect....

What with a business trip during the week (complete with no computer access and no bar at the hotel!! who ever heard of such a thing??) and the cold that I probably caught on the plane, this has been a low-productivity week for personal projects. (The business trip was hugely successful, however.)

Today is the first day my head has been on straight since I've been sick, and I actually got a lot accomplished. I've been through the several folders and boxes of letters, photos and documents that I've accumulated and separated everything identifiable out into person- or family-specific folders. I made a bunch of new entries into the database as necessary to generate IDs for my folders. Now I have a nice neat shelf of labeled files and two considerably smaller piles of "unknowns." I think this will really help me get geared up to start scanning and uploading some of this GOLDMINE of history that I have. Obviously I'm very proud of myself :-)

We watched a documentary about Jesse Jones last night. It's amazing how much American history I don't know. This guy was simply a powerhouse. Anyhow, at one point in the show a great-niece is visiting some kind of archive-type warehouse to get a look at a conference table that Mr. Jones had built during the Roosevelt administration. And sure enough, it looks just like the warehouse in that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they store away the generic-looking crate on a shelf along with jillions of other generic-looking crates. So where is this place, for real? And how much COOL STUFF must be in there?

I'm finding that it's pretty easy to get sucked away into the past, especially if you're a Person Who Likes Stuff. I now have a drawerful of Family Stuff and I'm sure Mr. Man is tired of hearing me call it "treasure" and "pure gold" every time I bring it out. But that's how I feel about it. I can spend hours reading yellowed letters, admiring glamorous black-and-white photographs, deciphering great-somebody-or-other's ahnentafel chart written in pencil on ledger paper.... All of this Stuff is full of stories that belong to me. My family. I always thought of my family as small, but you only have to go back a little ways to suddenly have a stupendous number of relations! And then there's the time I spend surfing WWII websites, cemetery records in Indiana, photo archives of the LOC or NARA, searching for little bits and pieces that make the stories there belong to me, by virtue of having some relevance to an ancestor. Virtual Stuff isn't quite as satisfying as Real Stuff, of course, but it still counts.